Minisode #4 - Advice, Love, and Gratitude: Happy Three Months From Radical AI
Happy Three Months of the Radical AI Podcast! In this minisode we share the compiled advice given from our guests over our first 18 interviews, celebrate the Radical AI Community, and give thanks for the journey thus far. Thank you so much for your support!
Relevant Links From the Episode:
18 Pieces of Advice from the Guests of Our First 18 Interviews - A Radical AI Blog
Transcript
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Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about radical ideas, radical people and radical stories at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence.
We are your hosts, Dylan and Jess.
And we would like to welcome you all to our fourth mini soad. Just can you believe it's been for many Sowards already? They grow up so fast.
And what a fast three months.
So let's not get ahead of ourselves. We should explain what a Minnesota is for folks who are seeing this word. And basically, this was just a fun way. Just I don't remember if it was you or me or even if other, maybe I stole it from someone who came up with the term.
I think it was you, Dylan. I actually I think I, I remember you intentionally using the word Minnesota as much as humanly possible in every conversation. We had to try to coined the term and then pretend as if someone else had made it up and that it was already a term that people use all the time.
Robert, when research, we're always talking about how to justify and justification. So I wish I could give a justification for the atrocity. That is the word many. So. But I love it. It's it's kind of like my baby. So many. So this is the fourth one.
And what many shows are in the radical A.I. universe is that every. About four episodes. And we thought it would be a good idea to give a summary not only of what those previous four episodes were about and kind of our thoughts on them, but also a more general update about radically AI, especially as we continue to move from podcast. The podcast, of course, is staying the way it is. And we're adding things constantly to this project in some really exciting ways. And so we just want to make sure that listeners get kind of a down and dirty breakdown of what is happening in radically AI, especially in the interest of transparency, but also in the interest of, you know, fun and people being able to share this wacky journey with us, this radical journey. They might say one might say I might say we say we sell books they offer and say welcome to our fourth Minnesota. And this is a very special Minnesota is just mentioned because this is our three month celebration and a celebration of lots of things.
Just what else are we celebrating while we are just celebrating so many things behind the scenes? So to get all of your listeners a little bit caught up about what has been happening with radical A.I. and with Dylan and I with this project just for the podcast.
Let's start off with that. We have officially surpassed two thousand followers on Twitter. Thank you, everyone, especially those who responded to our tweet the other day and quickly helped us get past that two thousand.
And by tweet, you mean Dylan, they said, hey, do you have any friends that can help us get this? Which we tried to do everything ethically and we know numbers don't matter, but that two thousand milestone was huge for us.
I don't think that Justin, I have ever been like at least the instigators for a projects that have gone over two thousand Twitter followers. So that that was just a big milestone for us. Thank you all for your help with that.
Definitely. And I think it's also important to note for anybody who is new in this space. We launched three months ago. So Dylan said this like, this is our three month celebration, but we literally launched on April 10, 2020 with our first three episodes of this podcast. And when we launched, I think we were at like maybe just barely past one hundred Twitter followers, although it's been. Yeah, maybe even less. And, you know, we started this project in general in March. So it's been a fast few months and it has been so amazing. We'll get into all that. There's so much to say. Anyways, continuing with these numerical updates, two thousand followers on Twitter. And then the other big number we've hit is 13000 downloads on the episodes, which is really crazy. And it's kind of hard to believe that we hit that number had.
Yeah.
So we have a total of however many episodes might be 25 now. I think I didn't look back. We've been putting out a lot of freaking content. And so thank you all for it for being with us.
And we've hit 13000 unique downloads for from all of you. So thank you all so much for being a part of that and for listening to not just our voices, obviously, but the voices of the guests that have been so gracious to appear on the show. And really the the heart of this episode, this Minnesota is a celebration of those guests and of all of you who have given so much support to this. It's much less of a, you know, Justin Dillon brag about how great this is going, although it's going great. But it's much more of a thank you all so much. And coming from a place of real humility for us of just, oh, my God, we thought we were gonna get. Twenty downloads in the first seven days and the first and then like maybe a hundred in the first month. Like what we did our original business plan and within the first three months, we've hit 13000. And it's just like. It's just wow, it's just such a. Such a wow moment. And the amount of people have been able to speak to and learn from. In that time, both you have been on the show and beyond is just incredible.
Yeah, that's so true because, I mean, even though this project is going really well right now, this project would be nothing without all of the guests who have come on this show, without all of the people who have been listening and this amazing community that we have connected with. And speaking of this community, we have started some organizational partnerships. You are probably aware at this point that we've partnered with all tech is human for the rest of summer 2020 at least. And that's also big. Thanks. And shout out to David Ryan Polgar for helping us get that instigated. And another partnership we have going on is with Olivia Gamblin and the other folks at Ethical Intelligence. And there are several more partnerships that are in the works. So stay tuned for those.
And again, we just want to summarize all of that energetic thanks to say that we would not be where we are without this community and people connecting us, people sending us resources, cetera, etc. The list goes on of all the different ways, like we can not give credit to all the different people who have given us so much support and help and mentorship and even who have called us out for things so we could learn to do the job that we're doing better. And for this episode, in addition to all those people out in the in the like Geist of the ethics community and beyond, industry and academia. And again, we can keep making these lists of all the people that have helped us. We especially want to think and name specifically the guests who have appeared on this show.
And speaking of lists, here is that list. Special thanks to all of our first guests on the show. Tom Williams, kendry away at Morgan, Klaus Schwab, Ramon Sayda Garces, Shemekia Goddard, Sara Myers, West Ruaha, Benjamin Lilly Irani, Karen Howe, a Baiba Burr Högni Moon. So Joe Timna Gambro, Yushi Milner, Myriam's Sweeney, Deb Raji, Emily Bender, Beth Singler, Jevin Hudson, US Keys, Calvin Liang and bonus episodes with our partners.
Renee Cummings, Olivia Gamblin, David Ryan, Paul Ghar Mortality Nikken Day and Charlton McIlwain and future guests.
Mary L. Gray, John C. Havens, Nima Anon's, Kumar, Faye Fang, Amelia Yadav, anomic barman Audie Cari, Eric Rice and more. And of course, our future partner guests Safire Nobile and Merideth Brassard.
So if you have been listening to our interview episodes for a while, you know that in every episode we ask our guests to share a piece of advice to either a specific group or just in general to people out in the world. And so we wanted to begin a project by we wanted to we being one of our good friends, mentors and former guest of the show, Emily Bender, recommended that we do this. And we thought it was a wonderful idea. And so we took it because she offered to put all of these pieces of advice of episodes that we've done, especially these first 18 episodes that we did as radically I to get all those pieces of advice in one place. And so that is kind of the format and the theme for this episode, because we wanted to celebrate how much we have learned from each of our guests. And the hope is that by sharing these pieces of advice specifically, we summarize to some degree all of that knowledge or at least some of that knowledge that we have gained and that hopefully you have gained through the first three months of this show.
So let's talk details about this project. This is called the what next advice from the radical A.I. Community Project. And to start off the project, to kick it off, we're going to start in this Minnesota going through every single one of our first 18 guests and giving a small quote from the advice that they gave on our episode or on their episode. And we will explain who this advice was meant for. But we didn't want to stop there because at radical A.I., we're all about trying to give people action items and resources. So we will start by presenting all of these first 18 pieces of advice with a little bit more information that's not going to be included in the mini sode in a blog post on our Web site. And we didn't want to stop there. So for a comprehensive list of advice from all of our episodes, including future guests, check out our what next page. That will be a living document that we are going to update monthly with all of our guests and all of the amazing advice that they give on our show.
And we want to be very clear that this many soad and the advice that we are highlighting, because we'd like to keep them Minnesota as many as possible, and we're going to try our best to do that with this one, even though I keep talking. That there was just there was so much advice, right, from each of these episodes and we couldn't include all of the advice that we wanted to. So please know that both here and on the blog and maybe even on the comprehensive list that we're going to launch on our Web site soon, that this isn't going to be everything. So if you really want to hear from the guests own words, what their advice was in their own, like, brilliant syntax that we cannot possibly recreate through our our quotation voices. Please do listen to the episodes themselves and hear them in their own words, because we cannot do it justice as much as we will try to right here. So you may have heard us say that we're going to go through 18 episodes from one to 18 and tell you about what the advice was and who the guest was and who they were offering that advice to. And you may be asking yourself if you're really just on I tunes all the time and you're into lists. Well, you know, radically. You have more than 18 episodes. And that is very true. So this does not include our many Minnesota. And this is not going to include any partnership or collaboration episodes that we've done, mostly because those episodes generally on our Web site have a special place for more resources that we put together with the organization that we're partnering with. So this is one through 18 of the episodes that we've put on.
So, okay, Dylan, we've kept them waiting long enough. Let's just dive right into the advice and tell our listeners what next.
We're going to begin with someone who is very near and dear to our hearts. Dr. Tom Williams. And we asked Tom to give advice for students whether it was his own set of students or in general. And Tom, this is a direct quote. And I think it's spot on. Tom says, Make sure you sleep and spend time on things that are not work and to make sure you have creative outlets also to make sure that you read and read and read as broadly as possible.
Up next is Kandari Awada. And Kendry, as advice was to everyday people in the time of Corona virus, Candra as piece of advice was to protect your data. And in this quote, she was talking about being careful about who has access to your data and specifically to educate yourself on how it might be used.
In our third episode, we spoke to Morgan, Clough's, Schwieterman and Morgan's piece of advice was to listeners looking to separate the hype from the reality in ethics and machine learning. And Morgan mentioned that we should have caution around perfection and a balance between good and bad use cases when we're talking about specific technology. Morgan specifically, and I quote said, if a technology is claiming to be perfect, it's probably not.
In our fourth episode, Sayda Gerst gave some general advice about contact tracing apps and technology and the age of covered. She said, quote, What's really important is to imagine the other society that will come out after Kovik 19 and not the one that we can go back to.
In our episode with Shimek Goddard, we asked her to give advice to everyone, especially people struggling in the time of the pandemic. And she, Meeka, encouraged people to be kind to themselves, to their technology and to each.
In our interview with Sarah Myers West, we asked her to give some advice to younger women in the A.I. Machine Learning and A.I. ethics community. And her advice was to hold tight to a set of core values and principles to develop that core sense of self and what you believe in. Don't ever be held back, particularly if you have an interest in working in science and technology.
In our seventh episode, we had the honor of being able to speak to Dr. Ruaha Benjamin and we asked Ruhama to give some advice to everyone in A.I. and M.L. and everyone who might be trying to do radical work out in the world. And this was a quote that really, I think, stuck with both of us. Just when Ruaha said love is an essential ingredient to anything that purports to and claims to be radical. And I think what was particularly impactful to me about Brewhouse concept of love is that it didn't hold love and anger as diametrically opposed. She said that it's a love when she talks about love that's intertwined with anger precisely because she loves people and she loves especially those who have been so harmed by systems of oppression. And she's so angry about it, like so many of us. And she made the point that anger and love can go hand-in-hand. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
We asked Lily Irani if she could give some advice on movement building, and Lily explained that, especially when it comes to the field of A.I. ethics. This is not just one movement, but many movements pulling in the same direction, she said. To treat research as a movement, to be relevant and to maybe even change your research agenda, to be more relevant to a struggle that's currently unfolding.
In our ninth episode, we interviewed Karen Howe, who is the A.I. editor for the M.I.T. Technology Review, and we asked her to give some advice to new journalists. And Karen invited us to think. What if your guiding philosophy in life was to always be willing to experiment and not to be afraid of being a beginner?
In our 10th episode, our interview with a babe or honey, we asked her for advice in terms of her vision for coming together as a community in A.I. ethics work and in radical work. And her advice was the vision for me as a system where radical work or work that empowers the least powerful is incentivized.
Our 11th episode was an episode that was near and dear to my heart because I think it's the only episode. And in all of these that we're talking about today, where I did the interview solo before we had begun justify the radical project and this was with us. So Joe, who is an archivist and I had asked Spoon's so to give advice to women in the field of STEM, and she had offered that it is important for women in STEM to persevere and to support each other. And I also asked her because I was asking a lot of questions in these first interviews to give some advice to learners and researchers generally. And she offered that folks should try to find how we all can use our knowledge for social good.
In our 12th episode and our interview with Timna Gambro. We had asked her to give advice to herself actually in eight years, and her advice was to allow people to evolve.
She said human beings have to be allowed to evolve.
I almost just want to, like, pause there. I just think that's just so. Perceptive. And so, so, so difficult in the space that we're in.
We followed that episode up with an episode with the CEO of Data for Black Lives. Yes, she milnor. And we asked her to give some advice again on movement building, especially in this time of so much social unrest, especially following the murder of George Floyd.
And yes, she said, how do we meet people where they're at? And how do we make sure that whoever we are. How do we come into these spaces in a way that is meaningful?
Yes, she pointed out that this process of movement building is an iterative process that happens over time and it's most importantly about relationship building with one another.
In our interview with Miriam Sweeney, we asked her to give advice to an end of semester student. And this was because we interviewed her at the end of her semester. I particularly resonated with this advice quite a bit, especially because of the project that we're doing together, Dylan, just because a lot of our process is to be critical and Myriam's advice was stay critical. She said it doesn't mean that you have to give up the thing that you're criticizing. Being critical just means that you're holding whatever you are criticizing to a new accountable standard in our fifteenth episode.
We had the opportunity to interview Deb Raji specifically about breaking news around IBM, Amazon and others about facial recognition technology and their plans with that technology going forward. And we spoke. I mean, this was a wonderful conversation. And we spoke with Deb about whether she had any advice for people who are in these complex systems, maybe with facial recognition systems or or otherwise, who don't know what to do about it. Like they know that something's wrong out there, but they don't exactly know how to take action. And Deb said that her suggestion was to keep looking and to keep investigating and to always be thinking, what can I do with what is available to me in our 16th episode?
We interviewed Emily Bender and special Shout Out again. Thank you so much, Emily, for giving us this idea to present the advice from everyone on this show.
And so the advice that we asked Emily to give was to linguists and domain experts and also machine learning engineers who are all trying to work effectively with one another to build a healthier relationship. So her advice for domain experts was to have some patients around the way that discourse comes out of machine learning and computer science. She said engaging is worthwhile, engaging is useful and powerful. And her advice to machine learning engineers was, you can't predict everything. You can't ensure that you're only making things that are positive. You do have a responsibility. Be part of the conversation.
Justify it. The only one kind of feels like this process is like the 12 days of Christmas. And I just, like, keep expecting us to end with, like, a partridge in a pear tree. Am I the only one with that?
I might be considering it mid-July.
Right now, that didn't cross my mind, but good metaphor. I'm very much in the Christmas spirit.
So at least the holiday spirit. I don't want to specify Christmas. So our 17th episode and we're actually we're almost there. I was with Beth Singler, who I get I have a camaraderie with because she's in the field of religious studies, which is also my field. And we asked her because she was previously a screenwriter, to give advice to screenwriters and storytellers. And her advice was to keep writing. She said, you know, there's so many stories that can be told. And she would love to read and to see them all.
And we're now at episode 18, a partridge in a pear tree. I just think I might keep that, actually. And now we're at episode 18. And in this panel episode with Jevin Hudson, Lost Keys and Calvin Liang, we asked any one of them to give advice to designers. And Calvin said that it's important to just recognize that design has a lot of power and it's easy to forget that design has individual effects on people. Don't forget that.
So one of the that's the end of list for now until a few days from now, in which we'll have a new batch of the list, which will be on that next page on our Web site when that launches.
But for now, I think it's just well, we've been going through this. And just you can I would love to hear how this process was like going through all this advice, how that was for you.
But for me, it just it really struck me that, you know, a lot of ways we see these folks as as colleagues to a certain degree. And there are so many of these folks who.
Have not just been colleagues to us during this project, but have really been mentors. And I actually don't want to name anyone specifically just because there have been literally like we would just be listening everyone again, because there are so many people here who have just been helped us us walk through, whether it's through their scholarship or whether it's through specifically like telling us, no, no, no, you don't want that as your logo or you what have you. There's just been people who have been engaged with this project in the in a capacity of dialogue that has just been so meaningful to us. And that's something that just is is seeing with me and I think gives us energy to continue to be putting out the quantity of product and content that we are even while we're working on our own HD. Yeah.
And just to add to that, I mean, I was going to mention the same thing, though, and I know we've said the words thank you probably a million times and as many said so far. But I'm just feeling, especially after curating this list of advice with you, just feeling so grateful, so grateful to be a part of this community, so grateful that you and I met each other and started this project, so grateful that the timing just worked out. For some reason to allow us to enter into this field in this way. And so, so, so grateful for those who have supported us, especially our guests who have come on the show. And because we are Piech, these students were learning and we love to learn. And I just I can't even begin to explain how much I've learned from everyone who's come on this show, not just in terms of their research, but in terms of the way that they conduct themselves in this field, their stories. And, of course, all the advice that they've given to everyone in this community and to us as well.
Yes. And like just you and I get a lot of comments on, like how well?
We work together, and I think it's because we continue to just learn so much from each other as well. So not to just turn this into a huge love fest and everything's love because there's a lot of like there's a lot of challenge also that was brought up in all these pieces of advice.
And I think that's really important to hold space for as well.
It's not just gratitude, like we have our work cut out for us as people in the space. So, like, let's let's do that work that all of these experts and people who have paved the way for it, for us, especially those of us who are coming up as as you know, we're newer into this field. It's important for us to name that end. And I think it is important for us to take time, as Ruaha said. Right. To lean into that love a little bit, because that's what's going to that's going to be our nourishment as we continue to hopefully do our own work, paving this path for those who will come behind us.
And there is so much more work to be done. This is just the beginning. So, again, happy three months to all of you and our amazing radical A.I. community. This journey is the start of something absolutely incredible. And we are so humbled and honored and grateful just to be here.
So for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at radical A.I. dot org. As we mentioned earlier, at the same time that this episode will be going live, there will also be a blog. So you can look specifically at these pieces of advice and you don't have to deal with all of the funny misspellings that will happen when we go through a transcript reader. Although if you ever are like, what? Just a fun afternoon with our transcripts, there are some really interesting things that are translated and we're working on it. So if you see anything you know, please, please let us know and we'll keep updating. But we can't catch everything. And please stay tuned for that. What next page that will be going live shortly on our Web site.
If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe at rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite pod catcher. We are also on Spotify and Google Play and we have a YouTube channel. Join our conversation on Twitter at radical iPod. And as always, Dylan, can can we do it together for for a three month celebration?
Yes. Three to one. It's always tough on Zoome. Stay radical. We'll edit it so that it's not the same.
Careful faith. Now, Antonette, so it's a big thank you for being a great editor. Thank you for being.
Here. Hey, thanks for stopping by. That's why there's so much gratitude in this episode.
I love it sounds I just got so much they so much things to go around for everyone. You get a thanks, you get to sing.
There's no way that I would have rather ended our three month celebration episode than an Oprah reference.
So I'm I'm glad that we spoke about happy three months. Yes, we did it.
Well, happy fourth month. The future is bright.
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